Page loading speed and SEO

Page loading speed and SEO

One of the often mentioned factors affecting the position in search results is the speed of loading the page. I have often heard that a slow loading page has no chance of achieving top positions in Google. Today I would like to show an example of a page that has been loading very slowly for almost a month. How did this affect your Google search engine position?

One of our websites (many years of experience on the web, highly positioned in Google, visited by 2-3 thousand users per month) suddenly stopped loading quickly. Specifically, its loading time for several weeks ranged from 6-20 seconds, which is an eternity for an ordinary Internet user. At Silence, we recommend that pages load up to 2-3 seconds and not be heavier than 2-3MB. For this page, the oversight lasted for almost a month and was caused by poor settings in WordPress.

The Google Page Speed ​​Test tool showed a speed score of 9-11:

The increased page loading time can also be seen in the chart below from Google Search Console: 

As you can see in the chart above, the loading time of the page was between 6-20 seconds from the beginning of November. In other words, the robot needed so much time to download it successfully.Given the widespread opinion, after such a long period of time it would seem that the number of indexed pages may fall, and the positions of this page will fall dramatically.Let's check it out.

Graph of the number of indexed subpages:

 Graph of page views and clicks in Google search results:

Visibility chart in Senuto:

The charts above clearly indicate that for a month the search result for this page has not changed. In Google Analytics, traffic in October was even 15% higher than a month earlier, and for the most valuable phrase that brings the highest traffic to this site, the site changed its position from 8 to ... 6.Does this mean that pages should now slow down instead of accelerating? No. In terms of the position of the page in the search engine, Google takes into account about 200 factors. And page loading speed is one of them. As you can see - for this site - this is not the most significant factor.This example is a good message for all those who say that without a fast-loading page top positions cannot be achieved. It turns out that this is not the case. I met repeatedly with the situation that in the top positions were websites that in Google Page Speed ​​Test achieved results in "red".The website should be looked at comprehensively and many elements should be considered when optimizing the website. In Silence, during website audit for SEO we analyze 44 technical elements (at the time of writing this article). And to this you should also add linkbuilding, i.e. getting links 

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